Crappy

Well, the lurgy has arrived.

Now 'happily' coughing and failing to sleep. The last thing I did before bed was wire an LED light up after attaching one to a heatsink before tea with thermal epoxy. These LEDs have a 'Lambertian' beam pattern i.e. mostly forward in a 140 degree arc. From the side you can see the beam is intense, but doesn't appear all that exciting. However pop a collimator lens in front and it's something else.

I had to rush a little to put it together so that it would work, and we'd already been out this evening. So we got to bed around 11.30ish with my head slightly buzzing. Sleep wasn't easy to find, and around 3.00ish had come and gone. 3.15 brought a full bladder and a scratchy throat that could no longer be denied, and then came the coughing.

So here I sit having 'enjoyed' something under 3 hours sleep. I've upgraded Firefox to version 2.0, re-done the plugins and downloaded some new extensions. Thunderbird has also been upgraded to 1.58 (was on 1.0 still). Sent some work emails as the corporate system is in ribbons right now (I still get spam, but I also get phone calls asking why I've not replied to such-and-such emails).

So back to the lights. I'm cycling the battery pack again as I now have 9 cells recovered (1 didn't make it) and have taken my 20 watt halogen lights outside to compare to the LED. These have special (and fairly expensive) bulbs estimated by the manufacturer to offer 30% to 50% more light than standard 12V halogens. Well the LEDs don't make as much light as one of these, but then they're only drawing 1/7th the power. I reckon that a pair of these K2 LEDs will provide plenty of light for off-road at night. The only downside is that they produce that really intense blue-white light, and I think the trail is easier to read with a warmer-white light.

Might well investigate the Cree XRE series LEDs next. They make 80 lumens on 1 watt as opposed to 100 lumens on 3 watts like these K2s. 2 of those as helmet spots with an AA sized 2700mAh pack would be excellent.

Nuts, dizzy from coughing now. Wish I could have some whiskey, but I need to go to work in a couple of hours. TTFN.